Dee Loveless is in her first season as head coach of the Mount Holyoke College dressage team. In addition to her coaching duties, she also serves as a dressage instructor at the Equestrian Center. As a USEF “R” Dressage Judge, she brings with her the knowledge and perspective of more than 15 years of evaluating the sport. She has spent the last 30 years training and showing horses around the world.  

Loveless has extensive experience showing horses. Her career began in the hunter division in the 1970’s in New Jersey, where she showed horses in hand as well as in performance. When her job in human resources with the Mobil Oil Corporation moved her to Texas, her interest in dressage and jumping led her to eventing. It was there that she trained and competed three of her horses through Training Level Eventing.

The dressage portion of the sport became her focus by the time she moved to Connecticut in 1989, and she has specialized in dressage since that time. From 1990 to 2007, Loveless went from training only her own horses to teaching riders and training horses on a part-time basis while she continued her judging duties and her full-time career in human resources.

During that time, she trained three of her own horses to FEI levels, including one to the GP level. Along the way, she collected many USDF, USEF, NEDA and AMHA year-end awards with seven different horses, including a World Championship at Third Level with one of her Morgan horses. She was also awarded with the bronze and silver medals from the USDF for her riding successes.   

Loveless took early retirement from her Human Resources Director job at the end of 2007 and built a new dressage training facility in Monson, Mass. She continues to teach riders and train horses at the facility while teaching and coaching at Mount Holyoke. Her private students include young riders, adult amateurs and young equine professionals, who range from beginners to riders competing at the FEI levels on horses of all breeds.

Over the course of her career, Loveless has owned and trained Thoroughbreds, Quarter Horses, Morgan, Dutch Warmbloods, Danish Warmbloods, Canadian Hunters and Hanoverian Warmbloods. Her diverse experience has given her a solid background for working with the variety of breeds of horses at the Equestrian Center.

Loveless credits her success to the many gifted trainers who have trained her. She was able to begin her dressage training working with three old world classical trainers -- Major Szilagyi, Captain de Szinay and Franz Rochowansky. The first two came from the Hungarian Riding School, and the later came from the Spanish Riding School. The competition trainers who followed built on that classical dressage base to round out her education. Those talented folks included Major Beal, Shannon Dueck, Roel Theunissen, Henk Van Bergen, Mikala Gundersen and Kathy Connelly.

Loveless believes that dressage was intended to be taught in this manner. The best should teach the newcomers, and those new trainers should be responsible for passing the torch forward. It is up to the current generation to take what they have learned and use it to help others master the art and sport of dressage. Loveless sees this as her mission at Mount Holyoke.